Letters To The Editor

May 28, 2006

A solution to the sludge problem

I agree with your editorial "Sludge and food," May 24, that a law requiring the labeling of food grown on sludged land will not make sludge spreading any safer. However, the law serves to alert consumers that sludge, according to the Federal Clean Water Act, is a pollutant, and pollutants should not deliberately be spread on our fields, farms and forests. Additional testing would not make sludge spreading any safer, either, unless we test for everything: every metal, pathogen and chemical compound, as well as their breakdown products and harmful interactions.

Testing such a toxic mix is impossible. We have neither the resources nor the protocol to test even less complex waste mixtures. Sludge, according to Virginia expert Robert Hale, may contain up to tens of thousands of man-made chemical compounds. So more testing is not the solution either.

There are newer options to safely manage contaminated mixtures, such as sludge. Waste to energy plants can use ultra-high temperature gasification, such as, for example, the Pyromex process, which reduces sludge to a harmless ceramic-like material, meets the nation's most stringent emission requirements, and, best of all, yields a clean and renewable form of energy.

Virginia and the rest of the nation need to explore 21st-century solutions for managing unrecyclable wastes.

Caroline Snyder

North Sandwich, N.H. *

Before the 'Code'

The real irony is that whether or not Leonardo da Vinci and others were protecting a secret is not the story. One need not search the convoluted maze of paths for this truth. The simple archaeological truth is right in front of our eyes, and the public of believers has simply not been educated about it. It has remained within the realm of scholars. Author Dan Brown took just a piece of it and popularized it.

Emperor Constantine did indeed order that all leaders (bishops, clerics, etc.) of the Christian factions come together at the Council of Nicaea, and he did indeed hold them in a room under guard with the dictate to arrive at one, single Christianity. As the movie accurately stated, the many factions of Christianity were tearing the empire apart -- in fact, Christians killed more Christians than Romans did during the days of persecution.

At the Nicene Council, the books that are today known as the New Testament were chosen, and a single Christianity left that room. Before then? To be an early "Christian," you first had to convert to Judaism. It was nothing more than another one of the Jewish sects in existence at the time.

Michael Yager

Williamsburg

Confederate heritage

As a retired American serviceman, I was saddened by Mark Ailsworth's commentary "Judge the senator by fitness to serve, not teenage behavior," May 13, regarding Sen. George Allen's regard for his Confederate heritage. Allen needs no one to explain his actions. He has been proud of his Southern roots and does not feel the need to apologize to radicals who preach tolerance but show none to those who take pride in their Confederate heritage. I pray that in his quest for higher office he will not become another spineless politician bending to the god of political correctness. If so, he will lose, like all politicians who have maligned their ancestors.

Instead of taking the time to instruct those who might be ignorant of what the Confederate flag really means, Ailsworth allows others to dictate what the flag represents. Even though the Ku Klux Klan has flown the Stars and Stripes and the Christian flag more often in its existence than the Confederate flag, he adheres to the liberal interpretation of the flag. Moreover, he should know that the Confederate battle flag is vastly different from the flag known as the Stars and Bars.

Ailsworth's commentary sounds not unlike a propaganda piece by an official for a totalitarian state whose ancestors fought for freedom against it.

I'm sure his Confederate ancestor would certainly not be proud of him.

Arnold M. Huskins

Converse, Texas

Multinational Ford

Recently, our governor and the mayor of the city that hosts a Ford truck-assembly plant both visited the union shop that represents the workers who contribute to our local economy, with the idea of changing the multinational manufacture of Ford automobiles' corporate mind into keeping the plant in Norfolk.

Many patriotic Americans have long insisted that buying an American product made in America was a viable method of supporting other Americans, and also demonstrating patriotism against foreign manufacture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who still think that there is such a thing as an American company worth patriotic support are living in a fantasy.

Ford, GM and Chrysler have not been American since the bailout of Chrysler under the Carter administration. They have never cared about Americans at all, except for the tax breaks that our legislators vote for them on schedule, according to the plans of their lobbyists.